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Indecent exposure

In the digital age, eyes are everywhere. Journalists embedded with troops brought the first compelling images of the Iraq war to the world in a new spin on media control.

Now, with the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, soldiers and civilians embedded with their own digital cameras have changed the rules of engagement again.

"The embedded process was supposed to give government a better handle on what journalists were doing, but now you have this whole rogue operation of civilians with digital cameras who have access to things the media don't," says Keith Jenkins, photo editor of The Washington Post Magazine.

US soldiers in Iraq are commonly equipped with notebooks and digital cameras. One day, when Sheryl Mendez, a photo editor at US News and World Report magazine who spent four months in Iraq covering the war, took photos of soldiers, one immediately burnt them onto a CD and passed it around to his battalion.

Add internet connections that have made it easy to send photos in seconds - as well as the web, which reaches audiences around the world quickly - and you have the potential for a public relations nightmare.

Photos showing humiliation and possible abuse at the hands of American captors from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison have caused international uproar since they were shown on television. The scandal has swelled since The Washington Post, which says it obtained 1000 digital images from Iraq stashed on CDs, published them and more on its website.

The Memory Hole's collection of prisoner abuse photos is the most popular site on the web when searching for "Iraqi prisoner abuse photos" on Google.

US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld summed up his frustration when he told a Senate Committee: "[People] are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media."

At least as frustrating to the US military has been the release of a "secret" military report prepared by Major General Antonio Taguba. The New Yorker provided extracts but GlobalSecurity.org published the full text of the report online.

In the report, Taguba concludes that military police were involved in such acts as using military dogs to frighten detainees and, in at least one case, severely injure one.

It is not the first time photos from the region have been digitally leaked. When a civilian contractor in Kuwait, Tami Silicio, took two photos with an inexpensive Nikon Coolpix camera and emailed them to a friend, they landed in The Seattle Times. However, the photos of soldiers' remains returning to the US in flag-draped caskets were shown on the web days before they made it into print.

Silicio was fired for providing the photos. During World War I, the US Army would execute soldiers who took photos, says Peter Howe, a former director of photography for Life magazine.

The rules on digital cameras are a grey area in the US and Australian militaries. Neither has a blanket policy on soldiers using them, nor do they screen emails for breaches.

But an Ausralian Department of Defence spokesman said that, "where appropriate", soldiers would be retricted from having devices that could take or send digital photos.

In the digital age, however, eyes are everywhere telling the story. "The iconic images coming out of this war may be the amateur photographs of Iraqi prisoners," Howe says.